by Peter Nealen
Hoping and praying that I’d armed it right, I rose up, found that I couldn’t see through the sight with my NVGs, spent a precious second trying to flip them up before ripping the skullcap mount off my head, and shouldered the AT launcher. I couldn’t see much; it was dark as hell under the trees, but that 30mm muzzle blast was pretty impressive, especially from so close. The real trick was going to be hitting it without hitting a tree trunk.
“Backblast area clear!” I yelled hoarsely, and fired.
The bang resounded deafeningly across the hillside, almost simultaneous with the blinding flash of the impact. The Puma was so close that I didn’t even hear the whoosh of the rocket.
There was a moment’s quiet after that deafening report. Then a jet of flame blasted up out of the top of the Puma’s hull, and it started to burn in earnest.
I dropped the tube, snatching up my rifle with one hand while I pulled my NVGs back over my head with the other, but instead of opening fire, I ran, bent double to try to avoid the sporadic small arms fire that was now starting back up the hill in the aftermath of the Puma’s death, to Dwight.
He was clearly dead. Even without being able to see him clearly, I could tell. The bullet had ripped his throat out, and he was limp and unresponsive. I had to heave him off the 48 so that I could pick it up. It felt like there was still half a belt in the soft-sided drum, or “nutsack.” I braced the gun against the nearest tree trunk, pivoted around it, and ripped off a fifteen-round burst at the handful of flickering muzzle flashes to the right of the stricken Puma.
Scott was suddenly by my side. “We’ve got an opening, Matt!” he screamed over the roar of gunfire. “We’ve got to break contact and move!”
I knew he was right. But right then, I didn’t want to leave that spot. I didn’t want to leave Dwight behind. I didn’t know if Phil and Greg were alive, but I didn’t want to leave them, either.
I’d left the dead after the airstrike that had destroyed Killian’s vehicles. I hadn’t liked it, but I’d done it. I had to do it now. But I didn’t want to. Right then, I was ready to stay there with Dwight, even if I died, too.
I wasn’t thinking straight. Not that I was aware of it at the time. All I knew was that my head hurt, along with the rest of me, that Dwight was lying there next to me and couldn’t move on his own, and that the people who’d killed him were down that hill, and if I kept fighting, maybe I could kill them, too.
Scott fired a fast series of pairs from the other side of the tree. “Damn it, Matt!” He fired twice more. “We’ve got to move!”
“Dwight’s gone,” I replied, between bursts. It didn’t make a lot of sense, saying that then. It didn’t make any difference in the context of what Scott was saying. Dwight was dead, but that didn’t change the fact that we needed to break contact or we were going to get flanked and wiped out.
“And if we don’t move, we’re all going to join him!” Scott yelled. “Come on, Matt, snap out of it!”
Maybe that was what I needed to hear. Maybe I was finally shaking off a little of the concussion from the drone strike and the shock of firing that 75. Maybe my guardian angel was smacking me in the back of the head, telling me to listen to my ATL.
I fired another burst, then got up and turned. The only thing to do was lead. There was no chance to plan and coordinate in that chaotic hell of a firefight in the woods, in the dark. “Moving!”
I ran up the hill. Or, I tried to. Weighed down by the machinegun, my own rifle and ammo, and up a steepening slope, it was more of a lumbering jog. But I got a few meters uphill and found another tree to get behind, dropping to a knee and checking that I wasn’t about to put a burst into Scott’s back before I dropped prone, laid the 48 on its bipods, and fired, holding down the trigger for a ten-count, the muzzle blast spitting flame and throwing up dirt and leaves in front of my face.
Scott and Tony moved, as more rifle fire echoed from above and to my flanks. At least some more of the team was still alive. I fired another burst as the two of them labored past me, shifting my hips to play the stream of bullets back and forth across a widening sector of fire as Tony and Scott got out of my way.
Then, just as I was about to get up, realizing that I’d left the reloads with Dwight’s body, and that I had maybe a quarter belt left, a new sound suddenly changed everything.
The wham of a 125mm cannon firing echoed down the valley, followed almost immediately by the boom of a Puma dying.
Medved had arrived.
Chapter 35
That 125mm thunderclap seemed to have shocked the entire valley into stillness. At least for a moment.
The EDC infantry, already stunned by the destruction of their armored support, fell silent for a moment before they started falling back. They were moving in good order; if anything, they were moving back better than we were. They were bounding back under cover of their compatriots’ fire, even as all hell started to break loose to the south.
I heard a 30mm cannon start pounding away to the south, only to be silenced by another crash of 125mm fire. What sounded like two anti-tank missiles roared out over the fields, and sporadic small-arms fire started to rattle and crackle from the town as well as the distant treeline.
“Deacon, Flat,” Bradshaw called.
“Flat, Deacon,” I replied, gasping for air as we kept moving. The Mk 48 was really starting to weigh me down. “Be advised, the east road is not blocked. I say again, the east road is not blocked.”
“Copy,” he replied. “Are you near that burning hulk up on the hillside?”
“That’s us,” I replied. “We’re going to try to keep moving east, break contact, and then hit them from the rear, down the next draw over.”
“Hold what you’ve got,” he said. He might have sounded a little exasperated. “Get to a defensive position and go firm. If we know where you are, we’re not going to accidentally shoot you.”
He was right. I was too rattled, too drained, and I was probably concussed. We were already in a bad position; the enemy was between us and the friendlies. That put us downrange of every weapon the Nationalists had. If we hunkered down and stayed in place, we could still do some damage, without risking a friendly-fire incident.
I looked up. There weren’t many rocks around there; that part of the Carpathians was old, and the slope was smooth except for the trees. But there was a thicker stand of pines or firs up above, about fifty yards to the north. It wouldn’t stand up to missile or cannon fire, but it was better than nothing.
“Phil!” I had to yell for him twice before he looked back, and I pointed toward the stand of trees. “Three-sixty, right there!” He nodded, and forged toward the stand of trees, and I followed, my OBR beating against the backs of my legs as I struggled uphill.
I got about halfway there before turning back, taking a knee with one foot braced against a tree, the nearly-empty Mk 48 pointed back downhill as I searched for targets.
The rest of the team was struggling up the hillside to my right and left; I recognized Tony by his bulk and the machinegun in his hands, David from his smaller size. I risked a look around, since the fire from the base of the hill had died away to almost nothing, and got a quick count. I only counted seven, including myself. Had we lost two more? Had we made it all that way only to be gutted here, at the end?
Tony reached a tree just uphill and to my left, and set up. “Set!” he gasped. I heaved myself to my feet and started slogging up toward the stand of trees.
It took far too long to get there. The staccato thunder of the fight down to the south and the rising growl of rotor blades to the north only added to the sense of urgency. But I pushed through, finally reaching the stand of trees and struggling to get set without my boots sliding out from under me. “Tony!” I yelled. “Turn and go!”
Tony wasn’t moving quite as fast as I had been, but as he lumbered up the hillside, I got a better picture of the overall situation, and our position. The stand of trees was in such a position that I could get a clearer picture
of the entire valley than I’d been able to farther down.
The first thing I saw was that my fears hadn’t come true; there were nine of us either already set or moving to the stand of trees. We’d lost Dwight, but so far, he was the only one we’d have to bury. Or simply have a service for; I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to go back for his body. He’d join the other unburied dead, both Triarii and regular Army.
The squad we’d been fighting had fallen back into the town, leaving quite a few bodies behind them. But they were the least of our worries at that point.
I could see the T-72, the BVPs, and the BOVs spreading out across the fields from the narrow, unimproved road leading over the ridge from Vrchrieka, their distinctive outlines blazing white in my thermals. Medved had pushed the tank out onto the higher ground just to the west of the draw we’d used to cover our approach, and was laying waste to anything that tried to shoot at him. So far, the element of surprise seemed to have worked to our advantage; it seemed that the EDC was worried about incursions from Poland, and probably thought that they’d gotten hit by a Polish recon unit. There was certainly no love lost between the Poles and the EDC; Warsaw had cut away from the dying corpse of the EU before the European Defense Council had been officially formed, and had, by then, enough military power on the German frontier to make it abundantly clear that trying to force them back into the fold was going to be a very bad idea. Being right at the end of the Fourth Balkan War, the EU had gotten the message. Their own forces had been badly handled by the Serbs and Kosovars both, and they knew that they didn’t have a good chance against the Poles in a stand-up fight. So, despite the fact that the 11th Mechanized had gone over just to their south, their entire focus seemed to be on the north.
The 11th’s BVPs were staying in the trees, hammering at anything that looked like a hardened position with 30mm fire. Their Spigot launchers were elevated, too; they were hunting any armor that might try to stick its head out.
But the dynamics of the battle were already shifting. I couldn’t see the east road, but I could see the west, and reinforcements were already coming from Makov and Varechov potok.
There were too many trees and houses in the way to get a full picture of the column that was working its way up the road, but I could definitely identify Pumas and the lower, wider silhouettes of Leopard 2 tanks. One T-72 wasn’t going to last long against that, if our IED ambush didn’t work out quite as well as we’d hoped.
“Flat, Deacon,” I called. “Be advised, we have eyes on enemy reinforcements coming from the west. Estimate company strength, Pumas and Leopard 2s.”
“Roger,” Bradshaw replied. There was a pause, presumably as he passed the information on to the Slovaks. “How far are they from your block?”
I peered between the trees. “I think the lead elements should hit the initiator in the next two minutes,” I said. But even as I let my thumb off the transmit switch, I felt a sinking sensation in my guts as I watched what was unmistakably a tank section veer off the road, pushing between the scattered houses and toward the fields. The tanks weren’t going to get caught in the ambush. And they were out of range of our remaining RPG-75s.
But before I could send Bradshaw the warning, the lead Puma hit the initiation system strung across the road.
For a moment, the western suburb of Vysokà nad Kysucou disappeared in a strobing flash and blast of smoke and debris. The stuttering detonations shook the ground beneath us, and the shockwave made the trees bend and wave as it washed over the hill. As the smoke started to clear, we could see intense, flickering points of light through the murk, as vehicles burned and men died.
In the aftermath, I mashed the push-to-talk button. “Flat! Tell Medved…” But it was too late.
Enormous muzzle flashes pulsed at the far side of the still-dispersing cloud of smoke and debris. The reports of the tank guns rippled out across the valley like the world’s biggest hammer hitting the world’s biggest anvil. Four streaks of bright light, all that could be seen of the sabot rounds, slammed into the T-72.
The tank disappeared in a bright flash and an ugly puff of smoke. The turret blew off and soared into the sky, coming back down on the burning hulk a moment later with a crash that seemed like little more than a tap after the cacophony of Medved’s death.
One of the BVPs launched a Spigot. The anti-tank missile streaked across the field, barely visible as a tiny point of flame in my fusion goggles, and slammed into the easternmost Leopard 2 with a resounding bang.
The German tank returned fire a moment later, and the BVP burned. The missile must have hit the front glacis and failed to penetrate the armor.
The other vehicles were trying to scatter, the BOVs ducking into the draw while the BVPs and the Tatrapans ran for the trees. Another BVP died, transfixed by another streak of white and briefly vanishing in a flash and a cloud of smoke, the wham of the impact drifting across the valley to us.
There was nothing we could do but watch. We had no air support, no artillery. The enemy that was killing our brothers in arms was out of range of the handful of anti-tank rockets we had left.
But that wasn’t going to stop me. We were probably all going to die. I’d be damned if I sat still and just watched it happen.
I dropped the Mk 48. “Have we got any 75s left?” I thought briefly of my own ruck, somewhere down the slope in the trees, but I hadn’t packed an AT launcher, either an RPG-75 or a Matador. I’d loaded up on EFPs, which weren’t going to help at this point.
Scott looked around, but David answered the question. “We’ve got two and one SA-18.”
The SAM wouldn’t do squat against tanks, but I wasn’t willing to drop it. “Drop everything but the launchers, weapons, and ammo,” I rasped. “We’re going to go down there and kill a couple of those tanks.”
It said something about the mental state we were all in that nobody objected. We were moderately safe there in the trees; the enemy had fallen back at the same time we had. Going back into the fight was only piling risk on top of risk.
But, despite the little squabbles that often arose, we were Triarii. And there were Americans, including other Triarii, on the far side of that valley, getting cut to pieces by the same bastards who had murdered thousands of other Americans not that long ago.
None of us were going to be able to look ourselves in the mirror again if we ran for it and left those men to die. Even if we could get to the border without being spotted from the air and intercepted.
There was a rustle of movement, almost inaudible as the battle raged down below, as those still carrying rucks dropped them, and the last RPG-75s were pulled out. I left the Mk 48 where it was; there weren’t enough rounds left in the nutsack to make it worth the weight anymore.
Another Spigot raced across the fields. They’d do better if they volley-fired them at the tanks, but the BVP commanders seemed to have lost a lot of their coordination with the loss of Medved’s tank and the two BVPs that had already been destroyed. The ATGM smacked into a house, missing the targeted tank entirely, just as the Leopard 2 fired again, its main gun belching fire. That answering tank round missed, though; the BVP driver wasn’t holding still for anything, which may have been why the gunner had missed in the first place.
“Ready,” Scott said. He had an RPG-75 on his shoulder, as did Reuben and Chris. I got up, my rifle back in my hands.
“Let’s go.”
The truth was, the way things were going, we probably weren’t going to manage to do much more than avenge our fallen. We had a good seven hundred yards to go to get into a firing position.
But we had to try.
Phil and I led out, the rest falling in behind us. But we hadn’t gotten far before Phil stopped, throwing up a fist.
I wasn’t sure what had made him halt; I scanned the smoke-shrouded forest around us, seeing the burning Puma that we’d killed, along with some of the more distant hulks of the vehicles that had run into the IED ambush.
I heard it then. The rising gr
owl of rotors. The helicopters were coming.
“Get that SAM!” I hissed, though we only had the one, and there was definitely more than one bird coming. Greg turned and started back up the hill toward our little redoubt.
Rockets howled by overhead, the smoke trails dimly lit by their exhausts, and slammed into one of the BOVs that had sheltered in the draw. The vehicle fireballed, then started burning fiercely. A moment later, two pairs of Tigers swept by overhead, their rotor wash lashing the tops of the trees, the snarl of their engines vibrating the ground.
We dropped flat, to a man, without a single command or signal to do so. It’s hard to say whether it’s worse to be under air attack, or facing armor on foot. The same sense of helplessness applies in both cases.
We could still fight; small arms fire against helicopters had been taught since Vietnam. And we would fight. I didn’t know of any case where massed small arms fire had actually managed to shoot one down, but damn it, we were going to try.
“Spread out, take cover, and get ready to shoot!” I yelled. It wasn’t as if stealth was going to help much at that point.
We weren’t going to get a shot at the tanks. They were too far away, and there was no way we were going to close that distance quickly, not with enemy helos overhead. Sorry, guys. We tried.
The two pairs had split, banking off to west and east, ready to take the remaining Nationalist vehicles in a pincer. Greg was coming down the hill, panting and skidding on needles and fallen branches, dragging our one SA-18 MANPAD with him.
Then one of the Tigers exploded.
The flash caught me completely by surprise. One moment, the helo was stooping on the BVPs below, the next it was a fireball raining bits of fuselage and shattered rotor blades on the fields beneath. His wingman tried to bank away, but exploded a split-second later.